Originally shared by Sue T
Well worth reading. Small data set, but very good observations.
Imagine this engaged attitude spreading throughout the whole country.
“Every Driver who had become a citizen in the last decade was engaged in the issues, had read up on policy, had put thought into their vote, and was genuinely excited to participate in our electoral process.”
#auspol
Remember to put the Coalition last.
Originally shared by Jeff Zahari
“The supreme irony of the Brexit vote was that a result that was supposed to be about the sovereignty of the UK Parliament must now be enacted by said Parliament that has no interest in doing so. It is not just that over three-quarters of UK MPs were for staying in the EU, nor that all parties represented were for staying (except the one UKIP MP), but that all the careful political arrangements set up by the UK political class over the last 50 years have now fallen apart.”
John Quiggin:
Oh, Hedy!
We should respond quickly to an application for admission from the EU-friendly country
Originally shared by Peter da Silva
Originally shared by Jeff Zahari
“The problem is that the referendum was one of the few places that it was possible to “send a message” in a way that might actually shake things up in some way, however incoherently. The implicit alternative is that those social interests should never be registered until they can be asserted in a “constructive” way; i.e. one that can be safely managed by the political system or “institutions of liberal democracy”. If one needs to grasp why much of the Left has been so hostile to the “left behind” voters — those it normally claims to stand up for — it is that the political system through which their interests are supposed to be delivered (but mysteriously never are) has been so rudely upset by the plebs.”
Originally shared by Jürgen Hubert
These are snippets from the new, post- #Brexit United Kingdom. They are originally from a huge Facebook album, and I am resharing them here because some people can’t access that album.
https://www.facebook.com/sarah.leblanc.718/media_set?set=a.10101369198638985&type=3
Now, some of you might think I am posting this to make an “anti-British statement. But really, I am not.
Instead, I want to make a statement how close xenophobia and racism are slumbering under the surface of society, and how easily they can emerge.
Because I suspect… no, I know damn well that the same could happen in my native Germany. There are already significant groups pandering to hate, racism, and intolerance. PEGIDA. The Alternative für Deutschland party. And if more mainstream politicians feel that they must pander to these, baser instincts – if they indicate that displaying xenophobia is something socially acceptable – then racist incidents will surge just as much in Germany as it is now happening in the United Kingdom.
This could be us.
Brexit is, for a large part, the manifestation of a rupture between the middle class and the working class.
The choice to leave was most often made by those with the fewest choices. They voted for change even though most people knew that change would probably only make things worse. They voted against the system itself and the EU, as ever remote and undemocratic as it is (though also relatively benign), because it was a useful scapegoat. Many of the regions that had most benefitted from EU investment voted Leave and it is unlikely that these funds will be replaced by the new political arrangement in London.
Just when the British Labour party had abandoned class politics once and for all, class politics in the form of wrongheaded, often racist, nationalism came roaring back into existence. The result is likely to be a prolonged detour to the political right which will only exacerbate the division and raise tensions even further.
“[England] resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kowtowed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”
—George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn
Never Stop Posting 